This week, in The People Behind
KDE, Tink interviews Rik Hemsley, who is actively working on Empath, a
groupware project much like Outlook for the KDE PIM project. In fact, his claim to fame is that "people seem to know me as the Empath man, but it's not even released yet."

The server is a closed source commercial product, we have to make money somewhere :). It is designed to allow small to medium companies, or even large and huge companies, able to implement groupware and workflow control for a much lower cost than Notes or Exchange with a lower cost of ownership as well. We are still working on all the details in terms of what the server will handle, but coding has already started.

Right now we are still anticipating that the first Aethera public beta will still be in November. I've had to pull a couple of developers to finish some other projects, so we got slightly delayed.

I actually found this quite inspiring: it shows people that they can go (almost) straight from menial job to being a productive KDE programmer - most people think they have to have 10 years C++ to be any help.